This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 14th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. He's been gone now for 20 years.

With the Mackinac Center's Joe Overton, over and above contributing the useful

Overton window to the lexicon, still has some lessons

for people working to advance liberty today.

I sat down with Joe Lehman, president of the Mackinoff

center to discuss the enduring contributions of Joe Overton. Who is Joe

Overton? Joe Overton was my friend.

Joe was a big thinker, policy genius, funny guy,

somebody who raised the standards of everyone in a room just by walking into that room.

And so we're discussing Joe Overton that it was 20 years ago that we lost him a young man.

Yes he was 43 died in a light plane crash. He was a pilot. And yeah, it was the night of June 30th. He asked me what I thought about him checking out of work a little bit early because it was a beautiful

evening for flying and that was the last time I saw him.

But he is noted well beyond our sort of insular world here of state-based

policy people here at the State Policy Network, he is noted well beyond that for a concept known as the

Overton window. So describe what that concept means in its crispest presentation because that matters here a lot of people sort of get this concept wrong or

misstate it somehow. Right. The Overton window was named after Joe, but he never called it that. The Overton

Window is a model of policy change and it helps us understand how ideas that are impossible today can become policy tomorrow.

Ideas that are impossible to believe that they could be made into policy. So the

window itself is an aperture that we view policies through.

And if you have a small window, you can see through the window.

You can see the policies through a window, but you can't see the policies above the window,

...